Changes to FAS Work Placement Scheme
Monday, November 16th, 2009We wrote about the FAS Work Placement Scheme that was launched back in June 2009.
Some changes to this scheme were announced recently – which will make it accessible to more people from December 1st 2009.
For unemployed participants the following criteria have been amended:
Recipients of most social welfare payments, including Job Seekers’ Allowance and Job Seekers’ Benefit, will now be eligible to apply. Unemployed graduates who are not receiving a social welfare payment will also now be eligible to apply.
2009 graduates are now also eligible to apply
The period, for which participants have to be in receipt of a social welfare payment in order to be eligible, has been reduced from 6 months to 3 months.
The requirement for a firm to have at least 10 employees has been removed.
•Previously firms could only participate if they did not have redundancies in the previous 6 months. This constraint has been reduced to 3 months. However, the level of redundancies in the last three months were less than 5% of the workforce, these firms will be eligible to participate.
The duration of the work placement has been increased to a maximum of 9 months. (was 6 months)
All changes take effect from December 1st 2009